DNAid+ A DNA-oriented sequence editor for the Mac © FrŽdŽric Dardel & Pierre Bensoussan Laboratoire de Biochimie, Ecole Polytechnique 91128 Palaiseau cedex - France Tel: (1) 69 41 82 00 p. 2829 DNAid+ is freeware. Feel free to make copies and give them to interested colleagues, as long as the copyright notice is preserved. DNAid+ is a DNA oriented full screen editor. It can handle several different sequences which are displayed in different windows. The windows containing sequences have lines of text and lines of numerotation interleaved. In these windows, you can type, cut, paste, delete and modify portions of sequences. The theoretical maximum length of sequences is 1,638,399 nucleotides or aminoacids. However, the memory of your Mac will probably get saturated before that and for very large sequences, some functions will become extremely time-consuming. DNAid+ will tell you when memory becomes overcrowded. DNAid+ also has a special window labeled ÇENZYMESÈ which holds the list of restriction endonucleases currently in memory. It is possible to add or remove restriction enzymes while using the editor and to save changes to disk. In this window, you will be able to select the set of enzymes with which the program will perform searches or restriction maps. Basically, DNAid+ is a multi-window text editor with standard editing and printing functions. But it also has built-in capabilities to suit the specific needs of molecular biologists. As in a word processor, you will be able to cut and paste fragments of DNA sequence to mimic a cloning experiment, and you can also reverse-complement whole or part of your sequence, translate it into aminoacids, search for restriction sites, make restriction maps, or calculate the length of DNA fragments in a multiple endonuclease digestion. DNAid+ also has powerful search functions, which can help you to identify open reading frames, regulatory signals, consensus sequences, potential oligonucleotides annealing sites and any complex or degenerated patterns of nucleotides or aminoacids you specify. Frequently used patterns can be saved to disk and can be automatically loaded upon startup to avoid typing them each time. This software is a standard Macintosh application and is interfaced to the computer environment. This means that you can import or export sequences as ÇText onlyÈ files or through the clipboard. DNAid+ runs on all MacIntoshes (including the MacII) with at least 512 Kbytes of RAM and under all versions of the system to date (including MultiFinder).